For the 1st Time in 6-and-a-Half Years “General Hospital” Is the #1 Program in Daytime in Women 18-49 for Two-Straight Weeks; Returning Legacy Characters and Compelling Story Lines Driving 7-Year Season High

ABC:

For the week of December 9, 2013, ABC delivered a clean sweep across target women demos, setting a near 2-year high in Women 18-49 (645,000/1.0 rating) and Women 25-54 (865,000/1.4 rating) – since weeks of 1/9/12 and 9/19/11, respectively.

Year to year, ABCposted the biggest gains of any broadcast network in Women 18-49 (+20% – 645,000 vs. 538,000) and Women 25-54 (+27% – 865,000 vs. 679,000), and was up by solid double digits in Total Viewers (+12% – 3.03 million vs. 2.72 million).

“The Chew”:

For the 2nd-straight week, “The Chew” delivered its #1 week on record in Women 25-54 (774,000/1.3 rating), its #2 week of all time in Total Viewers (2.94 million) and #3 week ever inWomen 18-49 (576,000/0.9 rating).

Impressively, the past three weeks have ranked as the series’ Top 3 most-watched weeks in Total Viewers, with the previous seven placing among its Top 8 weeks to date. In Women 25-54, the past three weeks place among its Top 4 weeks on record.

Year to year, “The Chew” generated the largest increases of any broadcast program in daytime in Total Viewers (+24% – 2.94 million vs. 2.37 million), Women 18-49 (+40% – 576,000 vs. 410,000) and Women 25-54 (+40% – 774,000 vs. 553,000).

“General Hospital”:

With the citizens of Port Charles lives in upheaval due to Robin’s return from the dead and the looming verdict for AJ’s murder trial, “General Hospital” ranked as the #1 program in Daytime for the 2nd consecutive week in Women 18-49(779,000/1.2 rating), marking the series’ first back to back wins inthecore demo in six-and-a-half years – since week of 5/21/07.

Notably, this week stood as the show’s 2nd-most-watched week in over two years in Women 18-49and in over two and a half years in Women 25-54 (1.06 million/1.7 rating), behind only last week and since weeks of 8/15/11 and 3/21/11, respectively. Moreover, the past three weeks have been the show’s Top 3 most-watched weeks innearly three yearsin Total Viewers – since week of 12/27/10.

Further, “General Hospital” is pacing for its best season in 7 years in Total Viewers –since the 2006/07 season – driven by compelling storylines, bolstered by the return of legacy characters.

Wow even with Vets taking up screen time, the 18-49 is up. Gee …how shocking. Why don’t they get it that you MUST balance the vets with the young newbies? Without the vets and legacy characters..you have nothing. Go GH and KEEP the vets on for gods sake or suffer the consequences of ratings losses.

robert

GH fell over 100,000 viewers in the demo. I bet all the daytime dramas fell big.

Marissa

Yea, I think we were all bracing for a ratings tumble.

Nice to see the positive press release, though! GO GH! (and The Chew!)

Chris

By today’s standards, those are very good numbers for The Chew and GH. Honestly, I did not think it would work out when ABC moved GH an hour earlier in the fall of 2012, but it’s become a strong 1-2 punch. The Chew has found its audience and has evolved into a fun program (roughly on par with AMC at the end of its run and much cheaper to produce). GH’s writing, stories, performances, and casting have been much stronger than in the past few years. It seems fairly obvious hat ABC is happy with their numbers, and they ostensibly have to be making more $$$ now than they were when they had three soaps. So folks, you can pretty much forget about AMC and OLTL ever coming back on the air, even if ABC were to somehow regain the rights, which is rather unlikely at this point.

If you notice, there is no mention of The View. I’m sure the ratings must be down quite a bit this season with Jenny McCarthy. I wonder by how much.

Matt M.

GH is a BEAST. LOL to all those who said GH wouldn’t top Y&R in the demo again for the 2nd week. Yet it did, by over 20,000 as well. Its success is so fantastic and very positive for the supposedly “dying” genre as well.

Matt M.

Never thought I’d say this, but those are VERY good numbers for The Chew as well with an average of 2.9 million viewers. You can thank GH for its success as well.

moshane58

Go GH. Its be an uphill battle to keep it on and now we know it will remain for sure for two more years.

Mike

Good for both shows. I may have overlooked it but I didn’t see any mention of GH’s total viewers. I wonder how they did there. It will be interesting to see the full ratings report this week.

Jagger Dagger

I guess the goofy “boycott ABC” plan some myopic soapfans keep clammering about isn’t really hurting ABC much now is it?

wiggi

It’s all about total viewers and GH has a long long way to go. YR is pretty awful though. Watched it today and it was a yawn fest. I keep meaning to give GH some love. Will start watching it tomorrow.

Christian

@wiggi Advertising rates are never based on total viewers. EVER!

SoapFansTogether

Let’s put these ABC pr spins into perspective:

GH is the huge success here – in sharp contrast to what ABC execs tried to fool people into believing only about 2 years ago!

GH has a 1.4 (!) rating in women 18-49 this season so far.

That’s about 0.6 (approx. 70%) more than “The Chew” and more than double the ratings that “Katie” is drawing in the women 18-49 key sales demo.

TV advertisers are certainly going to increase the pressure to correct the historic mistake of killing AMC and OLTL, since these shows could be in the exact same position as GH today.

Nick

@SoapFansTogether (or whatever your see thru alias is this week)

Since you seem to know everything and give pompous lectures about ABC’s daytime ratings/financial situation, you should be the leading candidate to be their next daytime president (sarcasm).